Global Warming: Take A Longer View

If you take a much longer view of the "global warming" picture, than just the past thousand years you'll get a vastly different picture. Looking at ice cores from the interiors of both Greenland and the Antarctic you can develop a far more accurate picture of what first the Medieval Warming Period was like. Here's an ice core temperature graph that goes back to the late Medieval period and shows that presently there is is indeed a disturbing warming trend:



But if you go back to a point of twelve hundred years, that upward trend isn't so threatening. This is the point at which the Vikings began to settle Greenland...um that could be because it was GREEN? Lots of room to farm, nice place to live? Also, starting around a thousand years or so ago, people in England were growing wine grapes, that's something that's not possible now (it's too cold) because the "climate changed" during the Little Ice Age.



On the other hand, if you go back further, say four thousand years, then the trend is in fact...not much of a problem. In fact historically, at the very stirrings of civilization some five or so thousand years ago, it was much warmer than it is now. Agriculture flourishes in warmer climate...than it does in colder times. Hence the serious reduction in population during the Dark Ages (that preceded the MWP) as well as the Little Ice Age.



But...take the picture back another eight thousand years, to roughly twelve thousand years before present era to look at the Holocene era in it's entirety, you realize that we are still in the Little Ice Age...and perhaps are only just now beginning to emerge from a 500 (or so) year period of global cooling.



But by looking at an ice core from Vostock, Antarctica which goes back...several hundred thousand year, it appears that periods of extensive glaciation are much more normal than the 10-12,000 year periods of warming...



Indeed, the Antarctic ice cores show that the periods of inter glaciation are in fact the anomaly in global climate and that we have had a longer than normal period outside of ice age temperatures. Perhaps the climatologist were actually right in the 1970's when they were predicting that we are actually entering a period of "pre ice age"...and the temperatures may in fact be trending downwards...for the next 90,000 years? Something to think about, especially as our political masters seem hell-bent on economic suicide in Copenhagen.